Thinkers Timeline

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German economist, philosopher, historian, and political thinker whose ideas have shaped the modern world more than almost any other thinker of his century. He was born in Trier, in what was then the Prussian Rhineland. His family was Jewish — both his grandfathers had been rabbis — but his father had converted to Lutheran Christianity to be allowed to practise law. Marx grew up in a comfortable middle-class home with a good education. He studied law at the University of Bonn and then philosophy at Berlin, where he was deeply influenced by the philosophy of Hegel. He completed his doctorate in 1841. He could not become a university professor because of his radical views, so he turned to journalism. As editor of a Rhineland newspaper, he began writing on political and economic questions. The Prussian authorities soon shut the paper down. In 1843 he married his childhood sweetheart Jenny von Westphalen and moved to Paris, where he met Friedrich Engels in 1844. The two men would remain close friends and intellectual partners for the rest of Marx's life. Engels, whose family owned textile factories, gave Marx direct knowledge of industrial conditions and later supported him financially for many years. In 1848 Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto. Revolutions broke out across Europe that same year. Marx was expelled from several countries before settling in London in 1849. He lived there for the rest of his life, working in the British Museum reading room and writing his great book Capital — the first volume of which was published in 1867. He worked in great poverty for much of this period, losing several children to the diseases of poverty and depending heavily on Engels's financial help. He helped found the International Working Men's Association in 1864, which brought together socialists and labour activists from many countries. He died in London in 1883 at the age of sixty-four. Engels edited and published the remaining volumes of Capital after his death. Marx's influence has been enormous and contested. Movements calling themselves Marxist transformed whole societies in the twentieth century, with results both remarkable and, in some cases, catastrophic. His work itself remains a reference point for anyone trying to understand capitalism, class, and modern history.

Thorstein Veblen was an American economist and social thinker. He was born in 1857 in Wisconsin and died in 1929. His parents were immigrants from Norway, and he grew up in a Norwegian-speaking farming community in the American Midwest. He did not speak English easily until he was a teenager. Veblen was always an outsider. He was a brilliant but awkward student. He studied at several universities and earned a doctorate in philosophy, but he struggled for years to find steady academic work. When he did teach, he was an odd and difficult colleague. He was a poor lecturer, mumbled, and ignored normal university rules. He moved from job to job, never holding a senior post. He was also an outsider in his personal life, with a messy private life that scandalised the universities of his time and cost him jobs. Despite this difficult career, Veblen wrote books that shook economics. His first and most famous, 'The Theory of the Leisure Class', appeared in 1899. It was a sharp, witty study of how rich people use spending to show off their status. Later books attacked the whole way business and industry worked. Veblen died poor and largely alone in 1929, just before the Great Depression seemed to confirm many of his warnings about the instability of business-driven economies.

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) was a British economist whose ideas changed the way governments manage their economies. He grew up in Cambridge, England, studied mathematics and philosophy, and became one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. He worked as a civil servant, an academic, a journalist, and an adviser to the British government during two world wars. His most important book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936, argued that governments should actively manage their economies rather than leaving everything to the market. His ideas shaped the economic policies of most democratic countries for decades after the Second World War and remain central to economic debate today.

Friedrich Hayek was an economist and political thinker. He was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1899 and died in 1992. His full name was Friedrich August von Hayek. Hayek grew up in a Europe that was about to change violently. He served briefly in the First World War as a young man. Afterwards he studied at the University of Vienna, where he was part of a group of economists known as the 'Austrian School'. In 1931 Hayek moved to Britain to teach at the London School of Economics. There he became the main rival of John Maynard Keynes, the most famous economist of the age. The two men disagreed deeply about how economies work. In 1944 Hayek published 'The Road to Serfdom', a warning that government planning of the economy could lead to the loss of political freedom. The book made him famous far beyond economics. After the war he worked in the United States and later in Germany. For many years Hayek's ideas were out of fashion. Then, in the 1970s, they returned to influence. He shared the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974. In the 1980s political leaders in Britain and the United States drew on his thinking. Hayek lived long enough to see his ideas move from the margins to the centre of debate.

Joan Robinson was a British economist. She was one of the most important economists of the 20th century. Many people think she should have won the Nobel Prize in Economics. She never did, almost certainly because she was a woman and because her views were politically uncomfortable. She was born in 1903 in Camberley, Surrey, in southern England. Her birth name was Joan Maurice. She came from an upper-middle-class family. Her father was a soldier and her mother was the daughter of a famous classics professor. Joan studied economics at Cambridge from 1922. The university had only recently begun allowing women to take degree examinations. She married another young economist, Austin Robinson, in 1926. They had two daughters. She became part of the famous group of Cambridge economists around John Maynard Keynes. Keynes was working out his revolutionary new theory of how economies actually work. Joan was one of his closest collaborators. She helped develop his ideas. She also did major original work of her own. Her 1933 book The Economics of Imperfect Competition introduced ideas that became standard in economics. She taught at Cambridge for over 50 years. She was finally promoted to a full professorship in 1965, much later than she should have been. She was sharp, sometimes difficult, and often controversial. She visited China multiple times during the Cultural Revolution and wrote about it more positively than later events would justify. She also visited North Korea and admired aspects of its economy. Some of these political judgements have aged badly. She remained intellectually active until shortly before her death in 1983.

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) was a Russian-American economist, novelist and philosopher. She was born Alisa Rosenbaum in St Petersburg, Russia, and lived through the Russian Revolution and the early years of Soviet communism before emigrating to the United States in 1926. She developed a philosophy she called Objectivism, which she expressed through both novels and non-fiction writing. Her two most famous novels — The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) — sold millions of copies and made her one of the most widely read thinkers of the 20th century, despite being largely ignored or dismissed by academic philosophers. Her ideas remain deeply influential in American politics and business culture, particularly on the political right.

John Kenneth Galbraith was an economist and writer. He was born in 1908 on a farm in Ontario, Canada, and died in 2006. He later became an American citizen and spent most of his career in the United States. Galbraith studied agricultural economics before moving into wider economic questions. He taught for many years at Harvard University. He was unusually tall, around two metres, and had a sharp, witty writing style that made his books bestsellers far beyond economics. Galbraith did not stay only in the university. During the Second World War he helped run price controls for the United States government, holding down prices to stop wartime inflation. Later he advised several Democratic presidents. In the early 1960s, President John F. Kennedy made him United States ambassador to India, a country Galbraith came to know and admire. His most famous books appeared in the 1950s and 1960s. 'The Affluent Society' (1958) and 'The New Industrial State' (1967) reached huge audiences. In them Galbraith argued that modern economics had not kept up with how rich societies actually worked. Galbraith was a public figure as much as a scholar. He believed economists should write for ordinary citizens, not just for each other, and he did so for over fifty years.

Milton Friedman was an American economist. He was born in New York City in 1912 and died in 2006. His parents were poor immigrants from Eastern Europe. He was the first person in his family to go to university. Friedman studied economics during the Great Depression, a time of mass unemployment in the 1930s. He spent most of his career at the University of Chicago, from 1946 onwards. The group of economists there became known as the 'Chicago School', and Friedman was its most famous member. Friedman was both a serious academic and a public figure. As an academic, he did careful statistical work on money, prices, and spending. In 1976 he won the Nobel Prize in Economics for this work. But he was also a skilled communicator. He wrote a popular book, 'Capitalism and Freedom', and later made a television series called 'Free to Choose' that was watched by millions. He became the best-known voice arguing for free markets and a smaller role for government. His ideas influenced political leaders in the 1980s, especially in the United States and Britain. He also advised governments in other countries, including Chile, which later drew strong criticism. Friedman was admired and attacked in roughly equal measure. Few economists of the twentieth century were as influential, and few were as fiercely debated.

Arthur Lewis was an economist. He was born in 1915 on the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia, which was then a British colony. His parents were teachers who had moved there from Antigua. His father died when Lewis was seven, and his mother raised five sons alone. Lewis was a brilliant student. He won a scholarship to study in Britain at the London School of Economics. He had wanted to be an engineer, but as a Black man in the 1930s he believed no firm would hire him, so he turned to economics and business. He did extremely well. In 1948, at just 33, he became a professor at the University of Manchester. He was the first Black person to hold such a post at a British university. Lewis spent his career studying a single great question: why some countries are rich and others poor, and how poor countries can grow. He also worked in the real world. He advised the new governments of several countries that were becoming independent from colonial rule, including Ghana, and helped set up the Caribbean Development Bank. Later he taught at Princeton University in the United States. In 1979 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on development. He remains the only Black person to win the prize in economics. He died in 1991 and is buried in Saint Lucia.

Amartya Sen (born 1933) is an Indian economist and philosopher. He was born in West Bengal, India, and grew up during a period of great upheaval: as a child he witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, in which around three million people died of hunger. This experience shaped his life's work. He studied economics in India and then at Cambridge University in England, where he later became a professor. He has also taught at Harvard University in the United States, where he has spent much of his career. In 1998 he received the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on welfare economics, poverty, and inequality. He is best known outside economics for two connected contributions: the capabilities approach, a new way of measuring human development and wellbeing, and his analysis of famine, which showed that famines are not caused by a shortage of food but by political failures that leave some people unable to afford the food that exists. He has also written important books on democracy, justice, identity, and the relationship between freedom and development.

Angus Deaton is an economist. He was born in 1945 in Edinburgh, Scotland. His father was a coal miner who valued education highly. Deaton won scholarships to good schools and then studied at the University of Cambridge in England. After a short job at the Bank of England, Deaton became a university teacher. He taught in Britain, at Cambridge and Bristol. In 1983 he moved to Princeton University in the United States, where he spent most of his career. He now holds both British and American citizenship. Deaton's work is about real, practical questions. How much do people spend, and on what? How is poverty measured? Why do some people live long, healthy lives while others do not? He is famous for being careful with data and for asking whether the numbers we use can really be trusted. In 2015 Deaton won the Nobel Prize in Economics. The prize honoured his work on consumption, poverty, and welfare. Deaton has also written books for general readers, such as 'The Great Escape' and 'Economics in America'. With his wife, the economist Anne Case, he studied a worrying rise in early deaths among some Americans. In recent years Deaton has openly questioned parts of mainstream economics that he once supported.

Claudia Goldin is an American economist and economic historian. In 2023, she won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, becoming the first woman to win it alone. She was born on 14 May 1946 in New York City. Her parents were not wealthy, but they valued education. As a girl she wanted to be a detective. Later she said she still thought of herself as one: a detective hunting for evidence in dusty archives. She studied at Cornell University and then went to the University of Chicago for her PhD, which she finished in 1972. At Chicago she was shaped by economists like Robert Fogel and Gary Becker. Fogel used historical data to study slavery and other economic questions. Becker applied economic thinking to family life and discrimination. Goldin would later use both approaches in her own work. She taught at several universities before joining Harvard University in 1990. At Harvard, she became the first woman to receive tenure in the Department of Economics. This was a serious barrier broken. Harvard's economics department, like most at the time, was almost entirely male. She has spent the rest of her career there. Her research focuses on the history of women in the labour market. She spent decades building long-term data sets on women's work and pay in the United States, going back over 200 years. This patient archive work made her one of the world's leading historians of women's economic lives. She has written many books, including Understanding the Gender Gap (1990), The Race between Education and Technology (2008, with her husband Lawrence Katz), and Career and Family (2021). She is still active in 2026.

Michael Eugene Porter (born 1947) is an American academic whose work on competitive strategy, national competitiveness, and the economic analysis of healthcare and social problems has made him one of the most influential management scholars of the past half-century. He was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the son of a military officer, and grew up moving around the United States and abroad as his father's postings changed. He studied aerospace engineering at Princeton, graduating in 1969, then earned an MBA at Harvard Business School in 1971 and a PhD in business economics from Harvard in 1973. He joined the Harvard Business School faculty in 1973 and has remained there throughout his career, holding the position of Bishop William Lawrence University Professor, the highest rank the university awards. His 1980 book Competitive Strategy introduced the five forces framework and the generic strategies of cost leadership, differentiation, and focus. Competitive Advantage (1985) developed the value chain framework. The Competitive Advantage of Nations (1990) applied strategic analysis to whole countries and introduced the diamond model and the concept of industrial clusters. Since the 1990s he has increasingly applied strategic analysis to social problems — healthcare, economic development, environmental protection, education. His 2011 article with Mark Kramer on creating shared value extended his framework to the broader question of what business should do about social problems. He has advised governments on competitiveness in many countries, served on corporate boards, and founded several organisations including the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard. He is known for his intense, systematic approach to analysis and for the discipline he brings to strategic thinking. His influence on how strategy is taught and practised globally has been substantial; he is often described as the most cited author in management and economics.